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More than two weeks after a snowstorm hit Kansas City, Google Fiber still hasn't restored Internet service to all customers. There were still dozens of Google Fiber customers without home Internet service, a KCUR article published yesterday said. The outage has continued since the storm on January 11 and 12.

Google told Ars on Friday afternoon that the storm affected "thousands" of its customers in the Kansas City area and that it hadn't yet finished restoring service to all of them. "While we can't share exact numbers, at its height, we had thousands of open tickets and are now down to double digits," a Google spokesperson said. "Getting our KC customers back online has been our top priority since the storm hit. We added both crews and equipment to help with this in the city."

Google said that the Kansas City storm was "one of the most significant weather events" to hit any Google Fiber city. "We have learned a lot from our response and will be incorporating those into every aspect of our planning for events like this in the future," the company said.

UPDATE: We asked Google for an update this morning. Shortly after this article published, Google told us that "service has been restored to all impacted neighborhoods" but that there are still a few customers who are offline. "We are still working to resolve a small handful of individual customer issues and get them back online as soon as possible," a Google spokesperson said.

Customers frustrated by Google Fiber response

The storm on January 11 and 12 dropped five to eight inches of snow on most parts of Kansas City, with some areas getting more than 12 inches, according to the National Weather Service.

The KCUR article details the plight of Julie Gronquist-Blodgett, her husband, and four young children.

"Gronquist-Blodgett says she and her husband have called Google Fiber multiple times and not been able to get a clear answer for why their outage has persisted, even as neighbors have had their service restored," KCUR wrote.

To get work done at home, Gronquist-Blodgett and her husband have been making heavy use of their smartphones. As a result, they "have racked up $100 in overage charges, which is more than their monthly bill for Google Fiber," the KCUR article said.

Although the storm reportedly caused outages for other providers, Google Fiber appears to have taken longer than other ISPs to restore service.

Google told Ars today that Gronquist-Blodgett's service has been restored. "The team worked hard all weekend to continue to restore service to the remaining customers, including the one mentioned in the KCUR piece," a Google spokesperson said.

“I was calling every day. What is going on?”

Google Fiber's inability to quickly restore service suggests that the company hasn't prepared for storms properly, telecom analyst Jeff Kagan told KCUR. "These kinds of things happen to utilities. This isn't an earthquake, it's just snow," he said.

Customer complaints were also detailed Friday in a Kansas City Stararticle. "I was calling every day. What is going on?" Kansas City resident Kim Riley told the newspaper after going 11 days without service. "You all are Google, the world tech leaders. This makes no sense."

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Also, PR department blaming cables instead of admitting getting caught with their pants down. What is it with American work/corporate culture that prefers weaseling out of a situation by shifting blame onto something else instead of owning up to it and fixing it up. Threats of lawsuits?

Google Fiber's inability to quickly restore service suggests that the company hasn't prepared for storms properly, telecom analyst Jeff Kagan told KCUR. "These kinds of things happen to utilities. This isn't an earthquake, it's just snow," he said.

Hadn't prepared for the snow? If the fiber is on ariels how exactly would you prepare? Put lots of blowdryers on the lines to melt any incoming snow. 11 days as an outage is pretty bad but it isn't like other utilities cable internet, phone, electricity don't have multiday outages after large storms.

Quote:

Power outages in the Kansas City area will likely continue into Thursday after last weekend's snow storm, a KCP&L spokeswoman said. About 39,000 were without power Monday.

Being without power in a blizzard for multiple days is likely a bigger issue than not having internet. Despite that the power company still had 39,000 people without power. Snow and ice break lines and it is time consuming to fix. Not much you can do to prevent that other than move it all underground.

KC resident here with Google Fiber. Didn't know there was anything going on. It wasn't just a bit of snow, it was a pretty bad storm that piled up quickly on trees. I lost several large branches from the trees in my yard, a coworker lost power for a day or two.

Hmm.. i thought most modern fiber lines are buried, not strung aerial on poles.

Any word on whether that was the case here? Aerial fiber lines that were far more subject to breakage or damage from heavy snow?

In the US in lots of places everything is on aerials. Fiber, coax, telephone (pots), electricity, etc. Everything that is wire shaped is on the same damn poles which get loaded with snow and fail. Hell I am surprised they don't suspend water, gas, and sewage lines on the poles too.

Snow/ice on the aerial lines. They snap the lines and/or knock down the poles or they overload nearby tree branches which fall and knock down poles or snap the lines. You might say why put all that critical stuff on suspended lines in areas prone to heavy snow/ice? That would be a good question and the answer is $$$$$. I didn't say it was a good answer just an answer.

Snow/ice on the arial lines. They snap the lines and/or knock down the poles. You might say why put all that critical stuff on suspended lines in areas prone to heavy snow/ice? That would be a good question and the answer is $$$$$.

Still not totally clear -- I assume they put all the poles back up, otherwise it wouldnt just be -Google's- network capabilities that were still out, it would be every other ISP in the area and likely the electricity too. Is there something about fiber that is particularly vulnerable to this that isn't being explained?

Hmm.. i thought most modern fiber lines are buried, not strung aerial on poles.

Any word on whether that was the case here? Aerial fiber lines that were far more subject to breakage or damage from heavy snow?

ISTR that one of the sticking points with rolling out Google Fiber to more people is that telecoms didn't want to share their utility poles.

The article stated nothing of this. If in fact the fiber lines were aerial would explain why there were so many break points after a major storm.

Google is probably fighting for access to these lines on the infrastructure poles they do not own. So the utilities are basically saying wait until we are done fixing our crap before you can get access to fix your rented space.

Google Fiber's inability to quickly restore service suggests that the company hasn't prepared for storms properly, telecom analyst Jeff Kagan told KCUR. "These kinds of things happen to utilities. This isn't an earthquake, it's just snow," he said.

Hadn't prepared for the snow? If the fiber is on ariels how exactly would you prepare? Put lots of blowdryers on the lines to melt any incoming snow. 11 days as an outage is pretty bad but it isn't like other utilities cable internet, phone, electricity don't have multiday outages after large storms.

Quote:

Power outages in the Kansas City area will likely continue into Thursday after last weekend's snow storm, a KCP&L spokeswoman said. About 39,000 were without power Monday.

Being without power in a blizzard for multiple days is likely a bigger issue than not having internet. Despite that the power company still had 39,000 people without power. Snow and ice break lines and it is time consuming to fix. Not much you can do to prevent that other than move it all underground.

Just like with Android at the start, Google is being graded on a different scale than the competition. You prepare for snow by proactively trimming trees around your infrastructure.

And $100 in overage charges is the users fault for not adjusting their usage to suit their situation.

Duh.

Yeah, losing Netflix is a bummer, but actually useful stuff like work email and news don’t really eat that much bandwidth.

Depends on your job. I work from home and often have to deal with multi-gigabit files. I would be in the same boat if I lost internet for two weeks. We lost it previously for 3 days and I had to camp out in a local cafe but there's a limit to what you can get away with....

Calling this "users fault" without knowing any of the details is ignorant at best.

Customer complaints were also detailed Friday in a Kansas City Star article. "I was calling every day. What is going on?" Kansas City resident Kim Riley told the newspaper after going 11 days without service. "You all are Google, the world tech leaders. This makes no sense."

Google are the world leaders at problems that can be solved by throwing coders at it. If the problem could be fixed in a day by having a 1000 developer hackathon, they'd probably run concurrent events in every large office for bragging rights. Anything that requires tradesmen boots on the ground (or in bucket trucks as the case may be) is well outside their core competency area. Them getting clobbered and faceplanting in their first bad storm doesn't surprise me in the least.

Google Fiber's inability to quickly restore service suggests that the company hasn't prepared for storms properly, telecom analyst Jeff Kagan told KCUR. "These kinds of things happen to utilities. This isn't an earthquake, it's just snow," he said.

Hadn't prepared for the snow? If the fiber is on ariels how exactly would you prepare? Put lots of blowdryers on the lines to melt any incoming snow. 11 days as an outage is pretty bad but it isn't like other utilities cable internet, phone, electricity don't have multiday outages after large storms.

Quote:

Power outages in the Kansas City area will likely continue into Thursday after last weekend's snow storm, a KCP&L spokeswoman said. About 39,000 were without power Monday.

Being without power in a blizzard for multiple days is likely a bigger issue than not having internet. Despite that the power company still had 39,000 people without power. Snow and ice break lines and it is time consuming to fix. Not much you can do to prevent that other than move it all underground.

Just like with Android at the start, Google is being graded on a different scale than the competition. You prepare for snow by proactively trimming trees around your infrastructure.

Depends on your area -- in my area, the trees are twice to three times the height of utility poles, and really the only solution to "trim trees so they don't take down power lines" is to deforest the entire area, which would be both environmentally and economically (in a tourist area like mine) disastrous.

That's one of the problems with running an ISP, there's no one-size-fits-all solution to everybody's infrastructure challenges everywhere, but if you want to have a wide reach, you have to solve -everybody's- problems if you want to maintain service.

Google Fiber's inability to quickly restore service suggests that the company hasn't prepared for storms properly, telecom analyst Jeff Kagan told KCUR. "These kinds of things happen to utilities. This isn't an earthquake, it's just snow," he said.

Hadn't prepared for the snow? If the fiber is on ariels how exactly would you prepare? Put lots of blowdryers on the lines to melt any incoming snow. 11 days as an outage is pretty bad but it isn't like other utilities cable internet, phone, electricity don't have multiday outages after large storms.

Quote:

Power outages in the Kansas City area will likely continue into Thursday after last weekend's snow storm, a KCP&L spokeswoman said. About 39,000 were without power Monday.

Being without power in a blizzard for multiple days is likely a bigger issue than not having internet. Despite that the power company still had 39,000 people without power. Snow and ice break lines and it is time consuming to fix. Not much you can do to prevent that other than move it all underground.

Just like with Android at the start, Google is being graded on a different scale than the competition. You prepare for snow by proactively trimming trees around your infrastructure.

I don't think Google put up any of their own poles. It's highly likely that all of their lines are running immediately below and parallel to existing power or telephone lines.

What they should have done is look at the incoming weather and started making contingency plans to get repairs done before the storm even hit.

Google Fiber's inability to quickly restore service suggests that the company hasn't prepared for storms properly, telecom analyst Jeff Kagan told KCUR. "These kinds of things happen to utilities. This isn't an earthquake, it's just snow," he said.

Hadn't prepared for the snow? If the fiber is on ariels how exactly would you prepare? Put lots of blowdryers on the lines to melt any incoming snow. 11 days as an outage is pretty bad but it isn't like other utilities cable internet, phone, electricity don't have multiday outages after large storms.

Quote:

Power outages in the Kansas City area will likely continue into Thursday after last weekend's snow storm, a KCP&L spokeswoman said. About 39,000 were without power Monday.

Being without power in a blizzard for multiple days is likely a bigger issue than not having internet. Despite that the power company still had 39,000 people without power. Snow and ice break lines and it is time consuming to fix. Not much you can do to prevent that other than move it all underground.

Just like with Android at the start, Google is being graded on a different scale than the competition. You prepare for snow by proactively trimming trees around your infrastructure.

Google doesn't own any poles. They are using the poles of the incumbents. The pole owner is responsible for that maintenance and google pays for that indirectly in the form of access charges. Still regardless even with perfect upkeep you get a bad storm it is going to break the lines. Did you not notice the 39,000 people without power five days after the storm and the power company anticipating it being more than a week before service is fully restored.

Falling branches and heavy ice are an equally opportunity outage creator. Phone, electricity, cable service and yes fiber all get knocked out.

I'm lucky; the development where I live has EVERYTHING buried, with conveniently placed access panels every second or third property for maintenance access.

That being said, we never got FIOS, and everyone around us did. That being said, Cablevision, despite being a shitty company, is a rock solid ISP.

EDIT

During Sandy, the High Voltage power lines that go through our development all went down. We still had power though; those lines served the next development, not us. We only lost power when the nearby substation went down, and were back up 6 hours later.

In my neighborhood in KC, the fiber lines from Google Fiber are run from the telephone pole to the house through the air (rather than through the ground).

I didn't have a fiber outage, but I did have power go out. Other than transformers blowing, most of the outages have been due to tree limbs falling on power lines and tearing them out.

I imagine there could be quite a few people who had their fiber go out from a limb dropping on the line. We've had KCPL and contractors working nonstop for probably close to a week to get everyone's power back on, and then a subsequent storm knocked out more power.

I can't imagine Google Fiber having the same level of manpower available, yet would likely be affected by the same type of issues.

Also I don't see comparative metrics for the other ISPs in the area (Spectrum, AT&T).

Hmm.. i thought most modern fiber lines are buried, not strung aerial on poles.

Any word on whether that was the case here? Aerial fiber lines that were far more subject to breakage or damage from heavy snow?

It depends on part of city/metro and age. I have Google Fiber in KC and it's all underground in my area (Plaza). I didn't have an outage and don't know anyone who did.

What was unusual about this snow was how sticky wet it was. It clung onto lines, looking like a 2" white tube and tree branches were more heavily weighed than usual. But still, Google needs to be prepared to bring repair crews from other markets when these things happen. The power company managed to repair more quickly.

I'm currently living in the area. Its not just snow. It rained heavily all day then dropped 15 degrees below freezing in a couple of hours, most of this part of the state was covered in a inch of ice. Then we got the five inches of snow.

Snow/ice on the aerial lines. They snap the lines and/or knock down the poles. You might say why put all that critical stuff on suspended lines in areas prone to heavy snow/ice? That would be a good question and the answer is $$$$$. I didn't say it was a good answer just an answer.

And it really is $$$$$ not just $$. My town's had to replace its sewer system over the last few years (century old leaking pipes, after about 35 years of prevaricating the EPA and PA DEP ran out of patience on stalling). This is a fairly dense suburban residential area; i'd guesstimate the average home has maybe 40 feet of frontage. For ~1k households the project cost $12M, or $12k per household to trench the roads, replace all the pipes and manholes in the street and the pipes connecting to homes; and then to repave everything. Moving power and telecom lines underground would probably be even more expensive; because you'd need two sets of conduits (can't mix high and low voltage wiring) and would have to trench peoples yards to run new connecting conduits everywhere (vs a lot of the sewer laterals being fixed by fitting a lining inside the old pipes). New developments can do it by just adding the costs to the lot fees people pay to buy in; and for denser urban areas with 5-50x the population density the per capita costs are much more manageable; but even in dense suburbs it's an expensive prospect. Once outside the cities the per household cost could easily end up being more than the house itself; meaning there's essentially no chance of it getting done.

Hmm.. i thought most modern fiber lines are buried, not strung aerial on poles.

Any word on whether that was the case here? Aerial fiber lines that were far more subject to breakage or damage from heavy snow?

It depends on part of city/metro and age. I have Google Fiber in KC and it's all underground in my area (Plaza). I didn't have an outage and don't know anyone who did.

What was unusual about this snow was how sticky wet it was. It clung onto lines, looking like a 2" white tube and tree branches were more heavily weighed than usual. But still, Google needs to be prepared to bring repair crews from other markets when these things happen. The power company managed to repair more quickly.

Another KC resident here. We had power out for a day. About 100,000 people lost power and some for several days. Our Google Fiber worked once the power was on, so I think it depends on what areas the lines were buried or not.